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Law Society Culture Programme

The Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme is an
academic-practitioner collaboration to map and generate knowledge that will
enhance the understanding of pluralism in relationship to changing notions of
identity, social prejudice and intolerance of faiths other than one's own. The programme works
towards developing understanding and strategies, including strategies for
grassroots level social action, with a view to increase spaces for cultural pluralism and social diversity in practice. click here to download the full document

The Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme-India (PPKP-India) had a
preparatory phase during 2007, during which a scoping study and the final
proposal have been pursued. Technically the PPIP should have been continued
from January 2008. However, the process of formalisation of the programme, in
terms of putting the overall structure in place at the international level and
the modes of transfer, agreements between partners etc., took some time and thus
more substantively it began to function from May 2008.

The PPKP-India has an active working group on pluralism that both advises on the activites and research as well as contributes actively to its content. the Regional Team is the following:

The most striking form of
developments in India that pose serious challenge to the idea of pluralism are
related to diversity of religious identities and the growing tendency of
monolithic or undifferentiated stereotypes of the ‘other’ and the consequent
widespread religious prejudice, identity conflict and inter-religious strife.
However, given the complex web of life in India both the source of strife as well
as their resistance are diverse and have both local as well as global linkages.

Besides the above background,
India also has a long tradition of secular activism, both in politics as well
as in the field of arts and culture. The predominant strategy deployed by the
secular activists is often the constitutional route of upholding the principles
of equality, freedom of expression and conscience of the individual, minority
rights and rule of law. This rich tradition of activism, which is still the
most prominent form of expression even today, however, appears to have reached
a kind of impasse, in the sense of a glaring failure of the secular state in
responding to the violations and inter-religious strife, a backlash on minority
rights principles and the ideology of secularism, the prolonged and often
politicised process of justice, the inability to deal with critical ‘human’
problems within the framework of retributive or compensatory justice
frameworks.

Against such a background, what
emerged as the conceptual framework for the India programme is a two-pronged
approach that addresses both the core processes mentioned above. They are being
pursued through two themes of knowledge, namely (i) Human Rights, Pluralism and
Rethinking the Secular State, and (ii) Faith and Diversity.

Human Rights, Pluralism and Rethinking the Secular State

This theme will engage with the
challenges faced by the tradition of secular activism in India. The objectives
of this activity include,

(a)
Codifying
and documenting the nature of data emerged from these activities and
interventions with a view to provide a comprehensive archive of materials that
indicate core political perspectives, social and legal strategies emerged from
these interventions;

(b)
Engage, with
analytical objectivity, with the outcomes of processes of these interventions
with the intention of help us rethink and strengthen those strategies and
processes;

(c)
Respond to
what may appear as a highly politicised or trivialised debates on culture, identity
and social conflict issues from knowledge activism vantage point to help
reframe the terms of such debates and also provide broad-based understanding of
those issues;

(d)
More
generally, to analytically reflect on the perspectives and strategies of
secular activism and thought with a view to rethink constitutionalism and human
rights to help energise them.

Current projects:

Under this theme, currently
there are three kinds of activity being pursued:

1. First,
generating resource lists, materials and documentation of the existing secular
activism is being done from the LSCP-CSCS location.

2. Second, a
more focused study and documentation of social and legal strategies that
emerged in the Gujart 2002 and its aftermath is being pursued by Somnath Vatsa.

3. Third,
another focused study is being under preparation to understand the developments
emerged over the last few years in the form of attacks on Christian faith in
different parts of India. The focused work will at the first instance look into
the socio-cultural contexts of Karnataka west coast. This in turn has two kinds
of activity: first, a workshop is being planned to be organised soon; second,
documentation on freedom of religion and conscience in history.

Faith and Diversity

This theme will engage with the
issue of ‘faith’, which has not been the focus of secular activism and thought
in India, from two vantage points:

1. The issue of globalisation
and diversity of faiths and the emerging challenges within that context.

2. Diversity in faith.

Globalisation and diversity
of faiths is perhaps widely addressed
in the western scholarship under various themes such as multiculturalism,
identity politics and the problem of recognition etc. While these debates have
some history and also numerically voluminous contributions, the predominant and
somewhat uncritical liberal vantage point in majority of writings makes them
vulnerable to recent reflections emerged from critical and the post-colonial
vantage points. This has already complicated the dichotomised constructions
such as the separation of the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’, for example, as
the distinction between them is no longer perceived to be self-evidently
opposing, and they are, in fact, related more intimately than what the liberal
scholarship so far taken into cognisance. This has also opened up a number of issues
around the theme of ‘faith’ itself. The issue of diversity in faith has been emphasized by social
anthropologists for a while. However, the simplistic and often prejudiced
stereotypes of the ‘religious other’ continue to predominate every discussion. This
indicates the need to do new knowledge generation on the diversity issue within
a faith, and its effective dissemination as an important requirement in the
engagement with the idea of promoting pluralism in India.

Current Projects:

Both these vantage points are
being pursued through (i) collaborative activity with the Patna Collective,
which currently focuses on ‘ethnographies of faith’ with the intended objective
being documenting everydayness of religion/faith as mediated by categories of class,
caste and gender and the consequent implications for the issue of faith in its
socio-economic context; the field work is currently in progress (ii) A review
study on contemporary thought and action on multiculturalism and identity
politics with a view to identify critical areas of reflection that need to be
brought into contemporary theory and action. Both these activities are being
coordinated by Shahrukh Alam from LSCP-CSCS.

Activities:

2008

Internships

Under the PPKP-India,
a youth internship programme has been developed with a view to engage with
young students to make them participate in both research and action on
pluralism issues. So far seven students have completed their internship
activities under the programme

Themes that were covered under the interships:

a. freedom of conscience

b. gender and religion

c. common worship sites

Workshops/Seminars

1.
Consultation
on Pluralism, Bangalore

This consultation was organised with a view to bring various
civil society organisations, including partner of Hivos, with a view to forge a
conversation between secular, human rights organisations working on issues of
pluralism and communalism and faith-based groups.

The Inter-Regional meeting on Promoting Pluralism was held in Bangalore during August 2008. teams from Indonesia, Uganda, India and Netherlands participated in the discussions on the developments in the Programme. Click here for the full report of the meeting.

3. Summer School on Human Rights, Human Development and Pluralism

The Summer School on Human Rights, Human Development and Pluralism is an annual event that brings together activists and academics from Netherlands, Indonesia, Uganda and India. the summer school is an intense and energetic way of engaging with crucial themes in the area of human rights pluralism and development and create networks of concerned and informed individuals and organisations that could potentially bring new energy and vigour to the debates and practice. the school in 2008 was held in Bangalore and was sponsored by Hivos, Netherlands and coordinated by Kosmopolis Institute at University for Humanistics, Utrecht and CSCS, Bangalore.